In the next few weeks, you’ll hear endless grumbles from charities about the Lobbying Act. They will argue it restricts their spending on political campaigning during the run-up to general elections. Of course, charities aren’t supposed to be party-political, and until now the highly-partisan campaigns they’ve run at election time have somehow never fallen foul of charity law.
The bosses of these organisations claim they’re on a higher moral plane than other political campaigners. This allows them to dodge questions about whether they have a partisan objective. The moral high ground is built, they say, on their aims, motivation and modus operandi.
But are these charities really acting in the public interest? Many were created by entrepreneurs who in turn reward themselves handsomely. Salaries for senior personnel at big charities – mainly recruited from within the sector – are benchmarked to the very highest grades of public servant, way in excess of what many private sector CEOs earn.
In fact, large charities are often vast lobbying machines, as much creatures of the corporate world as any commercial group, and as much part of the political world as any party. For example, political lobbying from some charities – often on behalf of rich commercial clients – has led to significant investment in renewable energy.
These lobbying machines don’t even sell decent ideas. Does Fairtrade help the world’s poor or in fact distort markets, create local cartels and harm subsistence farmers? Do anti-fracking and anti-GM NGOs warn of genuine environmental risk, or do they deploy anti-science dogma to spread fear and capitalise upon ignorance?
Oxfam, leading the charge against the Lobbying Act, had a winning campaign at Davos this year about the fact that 1 per cent of people have 50 per cent of the world’s wealth. By Oxfam’s own methodology, however, people in the UK who bought their council houses are in the top few percentiles of the world’s richest, while their graduate offspring yet to get on the housing ladder are among the world’s poorest 50 per cent. What did this have to do with the charity’s purpose, which is to help starving folk across the world?
It’s not just Oxfam: many of the NGOs and charities complaining about the Lobbying Act offer a world view that rejects the philosophy of the capitalist organisations who keep most of us in employment and, ironically, who endow the charities themselves. The charities don’t deserve some kind of special exemption from scrutiny: indeed, many of their ideas clearly could do with more examination. They are very welcome to contribute at election time, but there’s no reason why they can’t do so within the same rules as everyone else.
Eric Joyce is the Independent MP for Falkirk
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